Event Program - Perth International Arts Festival 2009

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2 Pacifica Quartet Simin Ganatra violin Sibbi Bernhardsson violin Masumi Per Rostad viola Brandon Vamos cello Recognised for its virtuosity, exuberant performance style and often daring repertory choices, the Pacifica Quartet has carved out a compelling musical path. Capping a remarkable 2009, Musical America named the group its ‘Ensemble of the Year’ and the Quartet received the music industry’s most coveted recognition, a Grammy Award nomination for ‘Best Chamber Music Performance’ for their recording of Elliott Carter’s String Quartets Nos. 1 & 5 (Naxos). Since forming in 1994, the Pacifica Quartet has swept top awards in the US and abroad, including the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant – only the second chamber music ensemble ever selected. The Pacifica Quartet tours extensively throughout the United States, Europe, Asia and Australia, performing in the world’s major concert halls in cities such as Paris, London, Amsterdam, Vienna, Tokyo and Perth. Each season the ensemble can be heard on many prominent radio broadcasts, including Chicago’s WFMT, Boston’s WGBH, National Public Radio’s Performance Today and Minnesota Public Radio’s St. Paul Sunday. Prolific in the recording studio, the Pacifica Quartet’s CD Declarations: Music Between the Wars showcases music composed during the turbulent decades between WWI and WWII. In January 2008 the Quartet released the first in a two-disc set of the complete string quartets of Elliott Carter on the Naxos label in celebration of the composer’s 100th birthday. Their recent recordings of the complete string quartets of Felix Mendelssohn have also attracted effusive praise from critics in the US and abroad. On the heels of the release, the ensemble was featured on the cover of Gramophone magazine. Over the course of the 2008/09 season, in celebration of Felix Mendelssohn’s 200th birthday, the Pacifica Quartet will present the cycle of his complete string quartets in New York City during a series of hour-long lunchtime concerts at Columbia University. These performances will include commentary by the members of the Quartet. This series is an encore of the successful and widely publicized Beethoven Cycle at Columbia in 2007/08. The Quartet will also perform the complete Mendelssohn cycle in Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Hall. Continuing its sell-out season performing Beethoven Cycles around the world, they will participate in cycles in Portland and Seattle as well as at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Unique in the chamber music world, the Pacifica Quartet will also present cycles of Elliott Carter’s groundbreaking quartets in San Francisco, at London’s Wigmore Hall and at Lisbon’s Gulbenkian Foundation. These arduous concerts – true labours of love – will complement the release of the second Naxos disc of the Carter quartets. Previous Carter cycles elicited fabulous reviews. The New York Times wrote glowingly of the ‘astounding performances’ and the Chicago Tribune praised the Quartet’s ‘astonishing talent, energy and dedication’. The Pacifica was appointed a member of The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s CMS Two program for gifted young musicians in 2002. The position involved the Quartet in a full range of activities organised by The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, from performances in Alice Tully Hall to community partnerships and leading roles in the Society’s educational activities. In January 2008 the Quartet performed the Carter Cycle at Lincoln Center and in November 2008 participated in the Chamber Music Society’s festival honouring Klaus Lauer. The Pacifica Quartet is an ardent advocate of contemporary music, commissioning and performing as many as eight new works a year. As resident string quartet for Contempo, a leading contemporary music organisation, the Quartet presents a series of concerts each year devoted exclusively to new music. In 2004 the Pacifica Quartet was appointed Faculty Quartet-in-Residence at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. The Quartet members also serve as resident performing artists at the University of Chicago and at the Longy School of Music in Boston. Reflecting its dedication to musicians and music lovers of the next generation, the Pacifica Quartet was instrumental in creating the Music Integration Project, an innovative program that provides musical performances and teacher training to inner-city elementary schools. In addition the Quartet regularly teaches and performs at summer festivals, including Maverick Concerts, Caramoor International Music Festival, Fontana Chamber Arts, Music in the Vineyards, Interlochen Arts Camp and the Madeline Island Music Festival and is also frequently invited for visiting residencies at universities and schools. The members of the Pacifica Quartet share a unique history of personal and musical friendship. First violinist Simin Ganatra, born and raised in Southern California, initially played with cellist Brandon Vamos and violinist Sibbi Bernhardsson while they were all teenagers. Sibbi later introduced violist Masumi Per Rostad to the group. Originating on the West Coast, where it played many of its earliest concerts together, the Quartet takes its name from the awe-inspiring Pacific Ocean. Throughout their journey as a string quartet, its members continually strive to be ‘Distinct as the billows/yet one as the sea’ (James Montgomery). For more information about the Pacifica Quartet, please visit: www.pacificaquartet.com Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) String Quartet in B flat major, Op. 18, No. 6 (1897–1800) i. Allegro con brio ii. Adagio, ma non troppo iii. Scherzo: Allegro iv. La Malinconia: Adagio; Allegretto quasi allegro Although written fifth, Beethoven probably placed the B-flat quartet last because of the lengthy, slow introduction to the last movement, La Malinconia (melancholy), which gave the work its subtitle. From the viewpoint of musical development, this introduction is decades ahead of the rest of Op. 18. In some ways it presages the late quartets of the 1820s, with its moving evocation of grief and despair; it provides, as well, an insight into the depths of Beethoven’s emotional state. The first movement opens with a vigorous, upward-leaping theme in the first violin that eventually becomes a duet with the cello. The far less agile subsidiary theme stays rooted on one note and then another, all within a rather narrow range. The development section ends with a held note, anticipating the return of the melodies, little changed from their original appearance.
A refined, dignified melody is the main theme of the Adagio, which is organised into three-part, ternary form. The theme is introduced by the first violin over a bare-bones type of accompaniment. For the second violin repeat, the importance of the accompanying voices is considerably higher. The entire quartet joins for a brief episode together before the violin states the theme for the third time, now in a highly ornamental style. The contrasting section arrives with a thin, tenuous line played in octaves by the first violin and cello. A short bridge passage and rising chromatic scale in the first violin lead to the return of the opening theme, this time even more highly decorated than in its first hearing. The Adagio’s stately mood is unceremoniously shattered by the eccentric and very original Scherzo that follows. Full of rhythmic verve, it is constantly being tripped up and sabotaged by misplaced accents and cross rhythms. One can only marvel at Beethoven’s ability to squeeze such intricate and complex rhythmic patterns into straightforward triple meter. The slight trio, a flowing violin solo with a short transition, leads back to a literal repeat of the Scherzo. The Finale, the climax of the entire composition, begins with the astounding La Malinconia, which Beethoven directs ‘must be played with the greatest delicacy’. The introduction falls into two parts, the first characterised by repeated tones and the second by a fugal, imitative texture. Woven throughout is a three-note turn, or gruppetto, which is inserted as a decoration before a longer note. Several times, loud and soft chords alternate, each one preceded by a gruppetto, which adds even more gloom to the phrase. The main body of the movement is fast, in the style of a danze alla tedesca, or German dance, which was very popular at the time. Although the tedesca never succeeds in raising the sombre pall cast by La Malincoina, as if to underscore the point, Beethoven twice interrupts the gay dance with short reminders of the slow introduction, before letting the tedesca dash furiously to the powerful last chords. From Guide to Chamber Music © Melvin Berger. Used with Permission. György Ligeti (1923–2006) String Quartet No. 1 ‘Métamorphoses nocturnes’ (1953–54) i. Allegro grazioso ii. Vivace, capriccioso iii. Adagio, mesto iv. Presto v. Andante tranquillo vi. Tempo di Valse, moderato, con eleganza, un poco capriccioso vii. Allegretto, un poco gioviale viii. Prestissimo When György Ligeti composed his Quartet no. 1 during the years 1953–54, both the performance and publication of the work were out of the question in his native Hungary. Although he held a prestigious teaching position at the Ferenc Liszt Academy in Budapest, the political and ideological climate of the country was opposed to the artistic avant-garde. As one writer has commented: ‘Musical innovation was as unthinkable as political dissent.’ Ligeti felt compelled by his artistic integrity to write such pieces, but he kept them hidden in his desk drawer until circumstances proved more favourable. The quartet’s premiere came two years after the composer had fled from Hungary during the anti-communist uprising of 1956, and took place in Vienna. The major musical challenge faced by Ligeti in writing the work was how to progress beyond Bartók’s great quartets. While several of these works were on the index of compositions banned from public performance in Hungary, Ligeti knew them in score and admired them. To address the challenge, Ligeti paid homage to the outstanding achievement of his predecessor, but did so in his own voice and manner. One of the clearest signs of his explicit transformation of the Bartók tradition is in the title of the work itself. The adjective ‘nocturnes’ is reminiscent of the older composer’s celebrated ‘night music’ style, while the use of the noun ‘métamorphoses’, indicates Ligeti’s intention to transform the Bartók inheritance. In terms of the musical material, the quartet contains several deliberate reminiscences of passages in Bartók’s quartets, but Ligeti adopts a freer approach both to musical form and thematic structure than is typical of the Bartók works. Ligeti commented that the structure of the quartet could be interpreted as either a single-movement or as a number of shorter, linked sections. Each of these sections is contrasted to each other with regard to expression, tempo, texture, timbre and internal structure, though there are also connections between the various subsections as well as abrupt discontinuities. The work begins with a melodic cell made up of two major seconds a semitone apart (repeated literally three times during the course of the quartet). This cell is accompanied by a type of rhythmic neutrality in which no strong sense of metre is projected. As the work proceeds, the interval of a major second gradually expands to a major seventh and minor ninth and is often combined with changes in both tempo and texture. Ligeti makes use of more unusual tonal colourings, such as a quarter-tone trill-like figure in the cello part in one subsection and enharmonic unison octaves played simultaneously in another (two of the instruments playing an A sharp, for example, while the other two play its enharmonic equivalent, B flat). Other striking gestures are the mechanical reiteration of a single note, most noticeably in the strong pizzicatos in the cello part near the end of the quartet, as well as Ligeti’s own direction at the beginning of the Prestissimo to play ‘very evenly, like a precision mechanism’. There is also a brief fugal section and the use of other contrapuntal devices, such as the layering of four different textures. At the very conclusion of the quartet Ligeti writes the direction ‘senza misura’ (unmeasured), so that the work ends, in a finely balanced, symmetrical way, with the same sense of rhythmic freedom with which it began. Annotation © Robert Forgacs, courtesy Musica Viva Australia Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847) String Quartet in D major, Op. 44, No. 1 (1838) i. Molto Allegro vivace ii. Menuetto: Un poco Allegretto iii. Andante espressivo ma con moto iv. Presto con brio The manuscript of the D Major quartet, the last of the three in Op. 44 to be completed, is dated Berlin, July 24, 1838. In a July 30 letter to violinist Ferdinand David, Mendelssohn suggests that it is one of his favourites, which may explain why it appeared first in the published version. ‘I have just finished my third Quartet, in D Major,’ he wrote, ‘and like it much. I hope it may please you as well. I rather think it will, since it is more spirited and seems to me likely to be more grateful to the players than the others.’ The first movement is particularly ‘spirited’ and ‘grateful’ in its writing; it fairly crackles with energy and exuberance. After the first violin statement, all the players share in the extension of the lusty principal theme. The second subject is much more restrained and introverted, a sharp contrast to the free-flying opening. The development, with great verve and dash, works over the various motifs of the main theme. The recapitulation and coda carry the movement through to the end. To act as a calming, moderating influence after the high-powered first movement, Mendelssohn replaces the scherzo with a gentle Menuetto. The middle section features a ceaseless flow of eighth notes against either long sustained notes or little snatches of countermelody. The Menuetto, much shortened, returns to end the movement. There is a poignancy and intimacy in the third movement that one rarely encounters in Mendelssohn’s chamber music. Written in sonata form, both themes are constructed in the same way – a lovely, lyrical melody in the first violin and an equally important, and attractive, faster-moving countermelody in the second. The development is simply a brief transition from the second theme back to the first. In the recapitulation, the viola adds another countermelody to the return of theme one; the reprise of the second theme, though, is little changed. After the two quiet inner movements, Mendelssohn obviously felt the need for a brilliant finale, and the Presto con brio more than fills the bill. It is a fiery saltarello, his version of a high-spirited 16th-century Italian dance form. There are two parts to the principal theme, one potent and forceful, the other gentler and more tender. The second theme is a soft, lyrical descending line similar to the second motif of the first theme. Notes from Guide to Chamber Music by Melvin Berger. Used with permission. 3
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Event Program - Perth International Arts Festival 2009

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